John Adams

by David McCullough

There must be good pay for officers. For the men, nothing would satisfy but a bounty and an offer of free land.

Stealing by his troops was rampant.

One day, as he and Benjamin Rush sat together in Congress, Rush asked Adams in a whisper if he thought America would succeed in the struggle. “Yes,” Adams replied, “if we fear God and repent our sins.”

On September 26, Congress took the momentous step of appointing Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as commissioners to the Court of France, to serve with Silas Deane.

IT HAD BEEN a little more than eight months since Adams arrived in Philadelphia in February, and except for the few days taken up with the expedition to meet with Lord Howe, he had never strayed out of the city.

Above all, with his sense of urgency and unrelenting drive, Adams made the Declaration of Independence happen when it did. Had it come later, the course of events could have gone very differently.

But when the British commander, General Howe, called a halt to the campaign on December 14, ordering his troops into winter quarters in New York and leaving New Jersey in the hands of small holding forces, Washington, to the astonishment of everyone, counterattacked.

as this passion for superiority.

History was the true source of “solid instruction,” Adams wrote to the boy encouragingly.

RAMPANT INFLATION, shortages of nearly every necessity made the day-to-day struggle at home increasingly difficult.

On September 26, Howe’s columns marched in to occupy Philadelphia.

In October, as if in answer, came the stupendous news of the surrender of Burgoyne and his entire army at Saratoga to an American force commanded by Horatio Gates.

November 1777

But before leaving York, Adams had been told by Elbridge Gerry that he was to be appointed a commissioner to France, in place of Silas Deane, who was being recalled to answer charges of questionable conduct.

Thus, the day he dismounted from his horse at Braintree, December 22, he and Abigail knew they had reached one of the turning points of their lives.

In view of the number of spies in and about Boston and the certainty of British cruisers in New England waters, departure was to be managed with all possible secrecy.

He had never in his life sailed on a ship.

unable to speak French, the language of diplomacy. He had never in his life laid eyes on a King or Queen, or the Foreign Minister of a great power, never set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people.

The date was Tuesday, February 17, 1778, and, as Adams had no way of knowing, it marked the beginning of what would become a singular odyssey, in which he would journey farther in all, both by sea and land, than any other leader of the American cause.

In his diary later, Adams would confess to moments of severe regret that he had ever brought his son, but he wrote also of his extreme pride in the boy:

[Tucker] has cleared out between decks, ordered up the hammocks to be aired, and ordered up the sick, such as could bear it, upon deck for sweet air.

On February 28, Adams could happily record in his diary that with smooth seas and a fine breeze the Boston had hardly any motion but forward. He was sleeping as soundly as in his bed at home.

“Europe, thou great theater of arts, sciences, commerce, war, am I at last permitted to visit thy territories,”

he wrote that night in his diary, allowing that the sight of France at last gave him a kind of “pleasing melancholy.”

The agreement, one of the most fateful in history, had been signed on February 6, 1778, or before Adams had even left home.

ADAMS WAS TO CROSS the Atlantic three more times, and John Quincy, too, in years to come would sail several times to and from Europe.

In Bordeaux he had been welcomed as a hero, cheered by crowds in the streets, embraced, escorted on a tour of the city, taken to his first opera ever, which he hugely enjoyed.

It was Franklin who orchestrated the social rounds, insisting the first morning that they dine at the usual French hour of two o’clock with Jacques Turgot (Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne), the distinguished economist and, until recently, Minister of Finance. Adams had felt himself unsuitably “accoutered” to appear in such company, he told Franklin, but off they went.

the Duc de La Rochefoucauld,

It was he who had done one of the earliest French translations of the Declaration of Independence.

“I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats,”

And of supreme importance was the King’s Foreign Minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most polished of all, a fleshy, majestic career diplomat who, during Adams’s initial courtesy call at Versailles, expressed dismay that Adams understood nothing he said, but politely remarked that he hoped Adams would remain long enough in France to learn French perfectly.

Everyone was so exceedingly polite to everyone, and to foreigners most of all.

The delights of France are innumerable. The politeness, the elegance, the softness, the delicacy is extreme. In short, stern and haughty republican that I am, I cannot help loving these people for their earnest desire and assiduity to please. . . . The richness, the magnificence, and splendor is beyond all description.

Adams’s objections stemmed not so much from a Puritan background—as often said—but from the ideal of republican virtue, the classic Roman stoic emphasis on simplicity and the view that decadence inevitably followed luxury, age-old themes replete in the writings of his favorite Romans.

His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend of humankind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.

He was seen as the representative American, the rustic sage from the wilds of Pennsylvania (quite apart from the fact that he had lived sixteen years in London), and he agreeably played the part.

Everything about him announced his “simplicity and innocence,” observed an adoring French historian of the day.

Except for the aged Voltaire, who had only recently returned to Paris after years of exile and who had only a few months to live, there was in the eyes of the French no greater mortal.

At a performance of Voltaire’s Alzire, at the Comédie Française, Voltaire himself was seated in a nearby box.

A few days later, Adams was present for what was felt to be one of the high moments in the Age of Enlightenment when, at the Academy of Sciences, Voltaire and Franklin, like two aged actors, as Adams described them, embraced each other in the French manner, “hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other’s cheeks.”

Had Franklin done no more than devise the lightning rod, Adams liked to say, it would have been sufficient reason for the world to honor his name.

His learning I suspect is pretty much confined to the classics and law. His knowledge of England and its constitution is [a] matter of real amazement to me.

Warned repeatedly that he was surrounded by spies both French and British, the imperturbable Franklin declared he had no worry, since he had nothing to hide.

But what neither Franklin nor Adams was ever to know was that Bancroft, too, was a British spy, his “emoluments” from the Crown amounting to 500 pounds per year.

As time passed, Adams’s appreciation of the importance of France to America’s future only increased. “The longer I live in Europe and the more I consider our affairs,” he wrote, “the more important our alliance with France appears to me.”

Adams detected “goodness and innocence” in the King’s face. “He had the appearance of a strong constitution,” Adams would write of the twenty-four-year-old Louis XVI, who was indeed kindhearted and robust, if painfully nearsighted and awkward, and who had it in his power to determine the fate of the United States of America.

But in the account Adams gave years afterward, it was the graceful Marie Antoinette, agleam in diamonds and finery, who remained most vivid in memory:

Adams was not a Mason.

To receive an answer from an inquiry to Philadelphia could take six months.